"I remember a student at a Nanyang Technological University dialogue several years ago saying at a public forum that the sight of a man holding hands with a woman of a different skin colour made his skin crawl.

His nightmare scenario: Should such interracial couples marry, they would dilute racial purity.

'When people become more mixed, fewer people will belong to a certain race. Won't we lose our traditions and cultures?' he said, to heckles from the audience.

A colleague described him as a bigot, and rightly so. But his concerns are shared among a significant number of people- partly, I believe, because they have been conditioned by the way our society defines race as an either/or notion.

The underlying mesage is, in other words, you are either Chinese or Malay or Indian or an Other. You cannnot overlap.

Reality, however, is much more nuanced and complex than such binary classification." -Zakir Hussain, The Straits Times

Notwithstanding myself and my friends, NTU students are stupid. And I cannot agree more with the writer.

♥ 1:20 PM